Sleepy British drama 'The Bookshop' a forgettable page turner

By Al AlexanderFor the Patriot Ledger

Friday

Aug 31, 2018 at 4:15 AM

Some movies are perfect for viewing on a cold, rainy afternoon, curled up under a duvet with a hot cup of tea. “The Bookshop” seems streamlined to meet such a mood. Set under gray skies in a tiny seaside English village where life moves slowly and everyone is disingenuously proper. It feels comfortable, lived in and nonthreatening; the kind of place you wished you owned a residence, particularly one of those cozy cottages surrounded by acres of tall, windswept grass.

It is here that recent widow Florence Green has come to restart her life by fulfilling a long-gestating dream of opening a small, quaint bookstore, the kind where there are seemingly more mice than customers. The kind of establishment where the second in command is a precocious 12-year-old girl in fashionable tights and Shirley Temple locks. You half expect her to suddenly break out into a song and dance with Arthur Treacher. Soooo adorable!

There’s a hissable villain, of course. Her name is Violet Gamart, a bitter hag with a stuffy, smug husband from the military who cluelessly executes her not-so-sly dirty work. It seems she wants “the old house” housing Florence’s new shop for an arts center that only she desires. But when you’re the richest grande dame in the land, what you want is generally what you get -- no exceptions, even if it means setting the entire village against Florence.

My fear is that I’m making “The Bookstore” sound intriguingly awash in skulduggery. It’s not. If anything, it’s more lethargic than a snail deciding to slow life down. Leisurely doesn’t begin to do justice to the goings on in writer-director Isabel Coixet’s very-sleepy, very-British drama. So little happens, you could probably solve a crossword while watching it; that's how little attention need be paid. But there’s something about Emily Mortimer’s lovely understated portrayal of Florence that’s the equivalent of comfort food.

There’s nothing really interesting or definitive about her lackluster character, yet you’re very much drawn to her and her fight for survival. And that’s all Mortimer. Her smile is warm, her eyes trusting and her demeanor open and giving. We recognize it, and so does her best customer, an old recluse who shares her uncompromising love of books. In keeping with the story’s Jane Austen-y undertones, we know him only as Mr. Brundish, a feistier-than-he-seems widower played with so much class and dignity by the great Bill Nighy you almost feel like you should stand up and bow when he enters a room.

It’s 1959, the year of Nabokov's “Lolita,” but the mood is very much Austen-tatious, where forked tongues flap clandestinely behind prim and proper facades. Early on, Coixet (“Learning to Drive”) leads us to believe that a “morally questionable” novel like “Lolita” prominently displayed in the shop’s window will lead to Florence’s downfall. And as she eventually loses grip, a subtext will emerge about the continuing debate over art’s abilities to inspire and offend.

But, no, nothing like that ever happens. In fact, barely a peep is raised over the issue. The real drama -- if you want to call it that -- is how the entire town conspires to cause Florence to go belly up, all at the demand of the haughty Mrs. Gamart, a role so sinister Patricia Clarkson (employing a sort-of English accent) could do it in her sleep, which she practically does. You’re thankful she has no mustache out of fear she might actually twirl it. To balance her villainy, Coixet inserts Christine (a very good Honor Kneafsey), the aforementioned child who also happens to be our narrator, only as a grown-up bookkeeper of her own voiced by a rueful Julie Christie.

As you’d expect, that narration is both pretentious and annoying, a lazy screenwriting trick for a scripter who has no idea how to visualize what she’s trying to say. All Coixet offers in her adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald's novel are a lot of pretty pictures and actors dapperly dressed in period costume. The story is dead on arrival, done in by both a lack of a well-developed plot and wooden characters. Yet, like I said, there’s something warm and relaxing about “The Bookshop” that keeps you turning the pages. You go with it, but unlike a good novel, it quickly slips from the mind, likely to never be remembered again.